Story by Leonardo Blair

 • 17h • 

6 min read

It could happen in the next two years or the next decade, but renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari believes that artificial intelligence is already so advanced and deeply entrenched in society that anything made of words, such as religions like Christianity and Judaism, will be taken over by AI.

In a stark warning to world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Harari said AI should not be mistaken for a tool but a thinking agent that can create new things and make decisions that will likely leave humanity in an identity crisis in the coming years.

“We always think that we can just use these things as tools. But if they can think, they are agents,” warned Harari, a University of Cambridge distinguished research fellow in its Center for the Study of Existential Risk. He is also a lecturer in the history department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-founder of Sapienship.

“Previously, all the words, all our verbal thoughts, they originated in some human mind. Either my mind, I thought this, or I learned it from another human. Soon most of the words in our minds will originate in a machine,” he said. “I just heard today about a new word that AIs coined by themselves to describe us humans. They called us the watchers. … AIs will soon be the origin of maybe most of the words in our minds. AIs will mass produce thoughts by assembling words, symbols, images, and other language tokens into new combinations.”

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